The Bluebird Word

An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: inspiration

Photo by Alejandro Perez on Unsplash

Walk a Block

22 October 2023 /

Poetry by Brian Christopher Giddens

The brace of wind
Belies the broad blue sky
And puffs of clouds above me.

I walk, briskly,
To clear my head.

But let’s be honest.

My head is as empty
As a vacant room,
Dull, devoid of detail.

I need an image.
An image that gives birth
To a first word, then a series of words,
Forming sentences, creating a theme,
A theme that leads to a poem.

Or perhaps a story.
An idea that sparks imagination,
A bursting star in a black sky,
Creating a world, a place,
Out of nothing.

A world of words that
Make my fingers fly ‘cross the keyboard
Stopping at times, mid-flight,
To wipe my eyes,
Or laugh out loud.

Lost, in a new land.

Brian Christopher Giddens writes fiction and poetry from his dining room table in Seattle. Brian’s writing has been featured or is pending in Raven’s Perch, Litro Magazine, Silver Rose, On the Run Fiction, Glass Gates Collective, Roi Faineant, Flash Fiction Magazine, Hyacinth Review, and Evening Street Review.

tree with maple leaves
Photo by Valiphotos on Pexels.com

What a Nature Poem Can Learn from a Love Poem

1 November 2022 /

Nonfiction by Jesse Curran

Here I find myself: ten years into a marriage, seven years into two kids, two-plus years into a pandemic. Eros has gone dormant, a long winter of eating potatoes and squash and quietly reading books before seeking deep sleep. But it’s spring and I’m dwelling in things that used to be. I’ve been digging through the old file boxes, trying to find that poorly proof-read graduate paper. The one from the Romanticism seminar. The one about Shelley hugging the tree. About the roaring inside. About laying your body next to the earth. I was twenty-five and on fire, the libidinous pulse of poetry reached into every mundanity and exaltation of the day. For those years, everything was erotic. Everything was about connection. About a radical sense of continuity. About reaching through the loneliness. It was running and running and running and being not yet arrived. Whitman’s lusty oak. A Georgia O’Keefe poppy. It was the only subject. The tree-hugger was it: a symbol of the magnetic pull toward a forgotten union. Then something shifted. I turned thirty, I got married, I got pregnant, I got tired. For the past half dozen years, I’ve been working on the virtue of contentment—an often Buddhist and sometimes Stoic sense of equanimity. But still I burn. My god, I burn. I steep like compost at heat; a bowlful of watermelon rinds and coffee grinds and a bucket of crumbling oak leaves sparking something in the backyard. The tree is rooted in the earth. It does not walk. We move toward it and it stares back at us. I long for it to tear its roots, stretch its mycelium, and walk toward me. And sometimes in April, when the colors splatter, when the candy tulips and the dayglo maple leaves buzz with a heady fecundity, when a friend offers to take the kids back to her house after the school pick-up, when it’s suddenly quiet—sometimes, in April, verging on May, I take my seat on the porch and feel the maple shoots lean toward me.

Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Spillway, Leaping Clear, Ruminate, Green Humanities, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. Visit www.jesseleecurran.com

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